BUHARI, KACHIKWU AND THE EXECUTIVE ORDERS

Audu Adanyi urges President Buhari to take charge of his administration

While President Muhammadu Buhari was away in London attending to his health challenge, his deputy who became Acting President, Prof. Yemi Osinbnjo, issued three Executive Orders meant to address certain ills observable in the way we run our system. The orders were meant to address extreme slowness, outright lethargy, unresponsiveness, lack of a sense of urgency in the way we conduct governmental business in the country, the stumbling blocks we have mischievously or callously erected to slow down the advance of government work and the opaqueness in the running of some of our very sensitive institutions. It looks like upon his return, the contents of those orders have not been brought to the attention of the president by his aides, which is why he seems to be carrying on completely oblivious of the fine points of those orders.

Why is one making the above remarks? I believe that if Buhari were aware of the essential ingredients of those executive laws or regulations, the incidence of the Minister of State, Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu’s famous memo to him, which has shaken this nation to its very foundation, would not have taken place at all.

Here is a memo that was written on August 30 and delivered same day to the president’s office. I do not know whether the communication was received and stamped in the president’s confidential registry as is the best practice with the civil service or any other type of bureaucracy in the modern world, or whether it was hand-delivered to the president himself due to its sensitivity. But whatever was the case, what has now come to light is that the president never acknowledged it; he never seems to have digested its content, for if he did, he probably would have realised the significance and sensitivity of the issues raised therein by Kachikwu and acted with some sense of responsibility and urgency and, above all, he never did anything about the issues contended in the memo. He just left matters lie like that, leaving Kachikwu in the lurch, in a state of suspended animation not knowing whether his memo reached him or not and whether something was being done about it or not.

Some of the issues canvassed in the Kachikwu memo are some of the very issues that propelled the president to power in the 2015 presidential election in which he trounced a powerful sitting president. The issues are those of transparency, accountability and openness which the president says he holds very dear. Anywhere such virtues to which he says he values so much seem to be in short supply, one would expect that the president’s sense of righteous indignation would be aroused and he will act with dispatch to restore those virtues to the necessary sector. Yet in the matter of Ibe Kachikwu versus Maikanti Baru and the cabal, the president was curiously lethargic.

One of Osinbajo’s memos frowns seriously against such behaviour by a public servant, least of all from a stakeholder like Mr. President. It even threatens a serious sanction against a public officer who acts like that. If the president were not the president, he, surely, would have been one of the first noticeable violators of Osinbajo’s orders and liable to serious reprimands and other graver sanctions. But he is Mr. President and who can bell the cat? That was the plaintive cry of the president of the Rats Redemption Council.

It is quite unfortunate that in the eyes of many Nigerians today, Buhari is held as a fan, or possibly soul mate of the chichidodo bird. This is a legendry flying animal that says he hates excreta with every ounce of distaste in his being. But know the chichidodo bird’s favourite meal is maggots. And maggots grow best in excreta. Buhari says he is an apostle of anti-corruption, a preacher of openness, transparency and accountability and due process. And when the absence of these principles in a place as sensitive as the oil and gas sector was brought to his attention, it proved too much of an acid test for him. He lacked the will to act. He prevaricated. He vacillated. He pretended not to have noticed what Kachikwu was highlighting. He tried to look the other way, hoping that the storm in the tea cup will fizzle away unnoticed by the public whose every gaze seems focused on every of his moves. He did everything and did nothing until fate caught up with him and dealt him a very kind blow in form of the leak of the memo and he was not roused to action as dithering any further will tear what remains of severely battered integrity to shreds and will stand naked in the market place.

Someone who was a former Buhariphile who has now become a Buhari doubter a few days ago described Buhari’s government as a perennial fledgling one. His government will continue to be fledgling and not firm on its feet if Buhari does not learn to begin to take charge. His response time to raging issues of the day is appalling. He is too slow to things as if he has the power to command the world to wait for him. But the world won’t wait for him. The people who wait for his leadership will not wait for him either. We have been tormented enough to become impatient. Besides, he seems too aloof, too patrician and too imperial for a country that has become so divided, again due largely to his actions and non-actions. He is also too trusting a man in a country where so many are perfidious and can betray anyone at the drop of a hat. He has also left too much in the hands of some narrow minded aides who seem to be out for their interests and not those of Buhari and the nation he leads.

Rather than pretend that there is no big deal in what Kachikwu has revealed about the messy in the NNPC under Baru because accepting so will amount to some form of self-indictment, Kachikwu’s courageous stance that he has had enough and would not like to accept any more rubbish should serve as a rude awakening to him about the feelings of many Nigerians about his weak and uninspiring leadership. People like Kachikwu who had a flourishing career where he was were obviously lured to come back home and give of their abilities and experience most certainly by the promise of integrity which Buhari wore like a turban. It must be extremely distressing to the likes of Kachikwu that Buhari is now behaving like the chichidodo bird, saying that he hates malfeasance to his bone marrow but tolerating shady deals being perpetrated right under his nose.

Buhari must realise that his leadership is being put to a severe test. And as we approach 2019, he and his party, the APC, will not have a smooth ride to power as they did in 2015 when they bandied Buhari’s so-called integrity as a banner that can conjure light to be and pronto light will be. This time around they will be judged by the promises they made us and how much of it they have fulfilled.

He should therefore see Ibe Kachikwu not as the man who embarrassed him and his government but as the man who gave him the much needed jolt to realise that he was deviating from the course and that he needs to repair back to that course.